Re-enchanting Rock Art Landscapes: Animic Ontologies, Nonhuman Agency and Rhizomic Personhood

Abstract

Recent theorizing of animism as a relational epistemology evinces how many indigenous communities perceive landscapes as alive with “'people,” only some of whom are human, and that these agents are perceived to exist prior to human engagement. Shrines, temples, groves, and other “sacred” sites in the landscape, including some rock-art sites, may not mark places of cultural inscription per se (culture is of course instantiated at such sites, but not necessarily a priori), but pre-given places perceived as inhabited with other-than-human agencies (e.g. helpers, deities, ancestors), and where relationships between humans and nonhumans are negotiated. Engagements with rocks, rock art and the wider landscape (filled with nonhumans) may involve other-than-human people dialoguing with humans, rather than a straightforward (one-way) inscription of meaning in which rock art is a passive “'cultural marker” and landscape an inert tabula rasa. Thinking through “animic” ontologies facilitates an approach to rock-art landscapes which disrupts the perceived ascendancy of human personhood, including that of “'the artist” and considers sensitively the agency of rock art, other-than-human people (and humans), and landscape in rhizomic networks of relationality—the efficacy of which is explored with examples from later prehistoric Britain.

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